In the first iteration of this adventure, I promised thoughts and verkakte writing. I’ve delivered on that promise. I also said there would be stories. Today, you get that last bit. What follows is fiction. There is some truth here, but quite certainly not reality.
This might not be for you. If you enjoy more of the recent verkakte writing, I will return to that fertile crescent soon.
As always, please send this piece to somebody who you think might enjoy it. (And, as I said before if you think this would annoy somebody, send it to one of your enemies. I’ll be an accomplice to your spite.)
He loved the idea of being known as ‘Ray Farmer – No Fixed Address.’
Itchy feet would move him around every few months or so. He dreamed about arranging to have his mail forwarded to his new hotel in a different place like he was a character in the novels of the American expatriate writers living in Paris in the twenties.
Ray envisioned living the life of an art thief; skipping town whenever the heat became too intense. “Oh, I’m sorry but he left a few days ago.” That’s all the hotel desk clerk would be able to offer the authorities who could manage to get a sniff of his whereabouts but nothing more.
He remembered the yellow and blue address book in the top drawer of a cabinet in his parent’s kitchen. An artifact from a time when telephone numbers and addresses had to be imprinted on paper in ink so they could be referenced when sending the annual Christmas card or calling somebody to make dinner plans.
When people moved, the old information below their name was crossed out, either aggressively blotted with sharp, thick vertical lines by his mother or neatly with a single straight line by his father. He wanted to be a person with multiple entries next to his name before his friends just gave up and wrote something like, “On the move…”
News from the outside world would reach him slower, as he was disconnected from the pace at which everyone else around him lived. An effort to reestablish a distance the world has lost in recent years.
But at the same time, there was a great desire to never leave the place he grew up. The idea of being tied down to one place forever appealed to Ray. Building a life in one spot in one corner of the world and knowing that place better than anybody else. To be an insider in a world only a handful of folks cared about.
Living a life in the way only a true local does. Knowing the restaurants and specialty shops that the passing tourist will find charming, but are sustenance to a local who lives a life worth living.
Knowing the secrets that come from walking the same streets over and over. Going up and down and from every different direction so he could connect one space of his small corner of the city to another. Ray was a visual navigator: Connecting one landmark to the next allowed him to piece together places and keep them fresh in his mind.
He wanted to learn the history and the details of his town. The ones that only come from talking to people who lived in that same spot and watched all those who came up and down the street. He would tease out all of the stories from them in time, something he knew he had plenty of in this same spot.
He could turn his life into a series of repeatable moments for easy living. Allow his mind to focus on what he felt deserved his full intention.
But Ray loved the opportunity of parachuting into unknown spaces and taking them in. Being a stranger meant he did not need to hide parts of himself. He could reveal the full version of himself. The truth will make you fast friends, and a stranger bullshitting becomes tiresome quickly. Of course, he would never be there for long enough for anything to matter.
He liked the idea of being somebody else’s anecdote. Ray saw life as an exercise in collecting anecdotes to tell other people while off collecting more minor anecdotes.
If I ever go looking for my heart's desire again, I won't look any further than my own backyard. Because if it isn't there, I never really lost it to begin with.
“She got sent to a magical land of color from the gray of Kansas and that was her takeaway? She spent her entire vacation, the first one she had ever been on, whining to a gang of inanimate objects in a glorious magical land of wizards and munchkins and ruby slippers and bad witches and good witches to send her back home? And once she returned home, she retired from travel for the rest of her life. Some quitter that Dorothy was,” Ray thought.
There's no place like home.
But it was that line that concerned him the most. If dreary, tornado-filled Kansas could be somebody’s garden of earthly delights, then how much would his life on the road be worth? That’s the line that makes everyone cry.
He worried about what the vagabond life would do to his mind. Would it cause him to feel strange? Would he be able to be well-rested without the comforts of a familiar bed; one his body has grown accustomed to because of repeated use.
But he worried slumping into life as a homebody, remaining in one place for too long, would damage his soul. A one-town lifer would know all things about home without experiencing the wonderful Oz of elsewhere. And everybody’s home is somewhere, why is his home more special than theirs?
Home as a place is more than where a person stores their collection of objects, where people stash their stuff to return to each night. It is where the familiar people who make up your life live. The ones who come to know you from all the other strangers. The friends and friends of friends who you got introduced to one night at the start of summer on a rooftop bar and only exist in the memory of that night and as characters in the stories your friend tells you.
It takes living in a place for a while to form a crowd who learn enough about you to form an opinion and you form an opinion about them. Home is also where the folks who truly despise you and you truly despise are, too.
Strangers don’t get to have enemies. The folks just passing through aren’t around long enough to foster a relationship of shared contempt. They don’t get nemeses.
Those were the two desires pulling at him by the time he reached a moment he called ‘peak young adulthood.’ The time just before he began starring down his thirties. At that time, he knew things would be expected of him.
This was the deadline for when his life’s big decisions would have to be made, to set some course for his life.
When it comes to life you can either be a contrarian or a conformist, he believed. There are no halfway houses for these conventions. The time now was to build a life or some semblance of one. And begin working toward whatever that looked like to him.
In earlier stages of young adulthood, foundations had been set on which to build a life before, but none of them were sturdy enough to withstand six months of reinvention. Now Ray was arriving at the point when life would become complicated because the consequences of reinvention become more severe. This was the period of his life when entanglements became permanent.
Sink into the sameness of a life lived in the normal world. A future which would include luxuries like owning not only a bed but also a daybed to spend summer afternoon’s reading like some high society member growing fat in that luxury of home. To encamp and build a life around himself.
Or he could be on the move to a new world wherever the routine of the day became monotonous. Skip town the moment he was able to put too many names to faces or the moment he realized the landscape passed by the car window in a haze of the expected.
Ray didn’t have an answer. But he was certain he would regret whichever he chose. Because he knew both options were rooted in cowardice.
Ben Krimmel is a writer from Baltimore who lives in New York.